Sistla Ramakrishna Rao, who became a septuagenarian on April 12 last year, unawares found an expression of his talent in the art of embossing a picture on a piece of paper card when he was hardly eight. Pleasantly surprised with the outcome, he repeated the exercise on a few more occasions, only to get overjoyed in discovering the fact that sans the feeling of necessity for any tool other than his own fingernails, that too, only of his left thumb and middle finger, he was able to accomplish the process with natural ease.
He went on to emboss hundreds of caricatures on his friends, associates, their habits, routine, and so on. Portraits of eminent personalities adorned with global recognition and adorned all over by all, also soon venerably got transliterated into the vocabulary of his art. It internationally stood recognised and hailed as Sistla Ramakrishna Rao's fingernail art that was created inventively developed and totally evolved as an arena of novelty in the world of art.
Soon Ramakrishna Rao was conferred with titles like ‘Nakhachitra Kalabrahma', ‘Kala Tapaswi', ‘Kala Papoorna', ‘Kala Saarvabhowma', ‘Silpi', ‘Kala Samrat' and, perhaps most befittingly, the title ‘Nakhachitra Valmiki'.
As if by divine grace, he got soulfully diverted to transliterate epics like Ramayana, Anjaneya Charitra and The Bible besides a few episodes like Gajendra Moksham from the Bhagavatham. These carvings themselves accounted for more than two thousands (Ramayana-800, Anjaneya Charitra-200 and so on). He was felicitated by personalities like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and so on, and by renowned organisations like Telugu Association of North America, World Teacher Trust and Delhi Telugu Academy.
This year, in early August, the management committee of the India Book of Records accorded recognition as a record holder at the national level for his embossed paintings especially of Ramayana using finger nails. A similar recognition at the international level was his finding entry into the Global World Records as a creator of a unique ‘nail art' in which medium he portrayed many great personalities – 800 drawings of the epic Ramayana and so on, as has been quoted in the certificate of Global World Records.
The recognition accorded by the India Book of Records and Global World Records soulfully stood hailed by all his well wishers and connoisseurs of his art as a real bonanza at the function where he was felicitated.
